Hey everyone, After much experimenting, we have finished prototyping our battle system!
Prototyping two ways to capture creatures
After studying some of our favorite inspirational games (Sekiro, Death's door, tunic, Elden Ring) and what made their battle systems unique, we started brainstorming how our battle system would work.
We knew that we didn't want the player to be aggressive - the premise of Atrio is that you are disposable. Giving you a shotgun, or a gigantic club that shoots gravitational lightning (looking at you Elden Ring), felt very out of place.
This is a challenge, because most battle systems are predicated on you "putting yourself at danger" when you go in for an attack. Striking with a weapon forces you to expose yourself to danger… but if you don't have to do that, there's no risk.
We had two very different ideas in mind 1. Find a way to fully automate creature capture (and skip doing battle altogether) 2. Add a traditional battle system that fits with a pacifist approach.
We prototyped both. Here's what happened:
Prototype 1: Automating Creature capture
We had this idea, what if the deer had to be released after 10 uses? It would be more environmentally friendly, and would force the player to need a consistent input of deer. We thought it'd be kind of fun to capture a deer, have it work for a bit, and then it just wanders off.
With that in mind, here was our plan: 1. You need someway to bring the deer into the vicinity to either stun bomb, or to knock out 2. A way to automatically places these traps (without you being there) 3. A way to hold the deer you've captured 4. A way to automatically replace the deer after the last one walked off.
We managed to solve all of these problems with three items: 1. Deer caller 2. Trap Dropper 3. Deer pen
1. The Deer Caller
Kitted with a very "alluring" hologram deer, it would call out to other deer for a minute. Deer would slowly start to gather in the area to check out what was happening, and could easily be distracted by tempting "treats" (aka traps to capture the deer).
2. The Trap Dropper
This would drop a trap every 10 seconds in front of it. It was also smart enough to place traps on top of gravpipes, so if the deer got knocked out on top of a gravpipe, the gravpipe would automatically transport it directly into the deer pen!
3. The Deer Pen
The holding container for knocked out deer. You could manually replace factories where the deer had been let free, but we also wanted a way for the players to automatically replenish it. The deer pen has a specified radius and any factories that are empty will automatically have a deer sent to it!
Everything in action
Here are all the pieces in action. We ask our testers to try and make 1000 resin and observed what happened (results at the end).
With the prototype working, we moved onto the second prototype.....
Prototype 2: The Battle Circle
The rules
In the middle of the circle is a pod that you can request equipment from. If you can survive without leaving the circle, you get the package! If you leave the circle, or die, you have to start over.
Starting an order would attract lots of aggressive creatures. We added 10 levels, each with different creature spawns and as you progressed, the types of rewards got stronger (but so did the enemies).
The Stun Gun
We messed around with the idea of a stun-turret that would automatically attack creatures on your behalf. You can see me abusing the heck out of :)
We weren't sure what would happen, but it ended up working quite well (and changes how you play into more of a tower defense style scenario, with some dodging).
10 levels
We added 10 levels, and each time you progressed you got more items to help you on your journey to survive. Some of the players definitely found it more challenging than others.... but with that, the prototypes were done! All that was left was to find testers, and have them evaluate each.
The Results
We found 10 play testers (2 couldn't make it in time) and had them play both. We had all play testers fill out a form to evaluate how they played.
You can see that the battle prototype won by a landslide. It should be noted that the one person who didn't like the battle as much didn't know that you could dodge, making the battle prototype nearly impossible.
The automated deer sounded good in practice, but was too hard to understand, and had a lot more "waiting" around. The testers were vocal that the battle system is a breath of fresh air from other automation games.
What's next?
Now that we have evidence to prove which direction we should be heading, we'll be starting to do a proper implementation of this, and adding it into the main flow of the game!
Stay tuned to see how it turns out
Featured fan art of the month
Atrio Gif by Siede
Hope to see you soon, Stephen + The Isto Team
May Feature Vote - A new Giant
Hey everyone! Stephen here to bring you the latest and greatest voting results! We're hard at work prototyping our new battle system (from the previous feature vote), and adding controller support.
But you're here for the feature vote!
Results:
1. Add a New Giant - 34.7% 2. Ability to Label Chests -16.3% And a tie for 3rd! 3. A way to repel deer from the base - 14.3% 3. A way to permanently delete items - 14.3%
Add a New Giant
A resounding first place! We're glad that you all love the story. Unfortunately... we have some (kind of) bad news We've decided to not release any story until the 1.0 update.
What?! WHY!??!
One of the big revelations of Early Access was the game mechanics help drive the story (specifically the way we execute quests and missions). With us still tweaking and adding new features, adding story elements without having the flexibility to change them will almost surely result in a less cohesive story.
That being said, we've gone ahead and designed a new station (as per your vote!)
This is the Iris Station. To avoid spoilers, you can drink in the visuals and wonder what the heck it’s all about.
Detail Shots
What does this mean for the feature vote?
Don't worry, we've actually gone ahead and started to add the Iris Station into the world, build out the dialogue, and some of the fun interactions that hopefully will catch you off guard
The Remaining Results
We expect the Iris station to be a huge undertaking, which means we don't have the bandwidth to work on both the Iris Station and any of the other features for an upcoming update.
As a small team of 3, we hope you understand that we need to be smart about how much we take on, and we hope to blow you away with the Iris Station!
Other Updates
- Frank has made some amazing progress with the controller support work. If you'd like to test it out for yourself, please join our discord! - We have some new videos dropping soon on the YouTube channel, so make sure to follow us there!
Featured Fan Art
I wanted to also start posting some of the fan art that we see come through the discord, to highlight our awesome community, from beginner artists, to experts! Shout out to @Forgotten_dev for this.
We'll continue to release smaller quality of life updates while we work on these behemoth, multi-month features. See you soon
-Stephen, Isto inc.
May 5 - Minor Hotfix
Hi Everyone,
We just released a very small hotfix with the following changes:
1. Fixed a bug where the springboards and lightbulbs were clipping into the plains grass 2. Fixed a bug where the mini-deer wasn't properly working after loading in from a save 3. Fixed a bug where you couldn't place the ore harvester on the quartz patches in Creative Mode
-The Isto Team
Quality of Life Update - April
Hey everyone, Stephen here with a quick progress update
We split our time this month between our next major patch (not out yet) and a small quality of life update. There's no real cohesion here, just a mish-mash of bug fixes, and minor updates.
That's right folks, if you want to decide what feature put into the game next, now's your chance. We've re-introduced the feature vote. Just log into Atrio, and select the "vote now" button on the roadmap. The top pick will be included in a future update!
New Features
- New Punk Monk Cinematic
What's this?! NEW STORY!?!? Kind of. When you first meet the punk monk, it's not very obvious as to what the heck is happening. All of our playtests showed that people missed the point of the story (and it was our fault). So we created a brand new cinematic to make it more obvious what's happening in the plot. It's not really new story, but updated.
- Character can harvest and open menu
We've wanted to do this for maaany many months, and got the chance to squeeze it in. It's mostly useful when you are harvesting a large patch of ore and want to peruse the menu. You can also open the menu mid-run (so long as you are clicking).
- Placing destroys small plants
It's always irked me when i'm trying to create a beautiful factory and a darn glowplants wrecks my flow. No one wants to stop building, harvest a glowplant, and keep going. We felt that "auto-harvesting" would be too op. Now, placing a building permanantly destroys plants. We hope that creating bases will feel a lot more seamless and fun with this change!
- Optimized placing/dismantling
Francois managed to find a way to optimize the placement code. Placing and dismantling should be a bit faster on all machines.
Major Bug Fixes
- The bug that almost killed us
After this last patch, several people reported a bug where the title menu was unclickable. We started looking into it - after a day, we could reproduce it, but people kept reporting it. We went through every version of the game dating back to September trying to figure out what was causing the issue (much to our chagrin), but it wasn't happening on our machines. Luckily, the folks in our discord we're incredibly helpful, willing to try out different versions so we could track it down.
After 3 grueling days, and the amazing help of our discord (Especially @Servant) we found the bug - having the game plugged into a subset of Huion drawing tablets. I say subset because Francois has a Huion tablet and wasn't having any issues with his being plugged in!!!
We've implemented a fix but at the cost of 3 days of development. We're just glad it's over.
There's also a bug where the factory randomly stops pulling items in. We spent ANOTHER 2 days trying to reproduce, to absolutely not avail. It's infrequent, but game breaking (and impossible to fix since we can't reproduce it). Instead, we've created a logging system that tracks as much info as possible in case a user out in the wild runs across it. It would be an enormous help to send us your .log files so we can try and track it down.
Other Bugs
Discovered backpacks no longer reload in freeplay
Adjusted the build tree so Scrap wires doesn't require Carbon fiber
Fixed a bug where the BackpackSize3 research was unlocked too early
Fixed a bug where the TorchDuration3 research was unlocked too early
You can now replace your dispense chest by placing a new one in different directions.
Fixed a bug where the player would not die from circuit juice
Fixed a bug where loading a main game from freeplay would merge the two modes
What's next?
Our next major patch is a multi-mvonth endeavor. We're going to try and release small quality of life updates in parallel to working on the big patches.
Thanks for your patience and happy automating, Stephen + The Isto Inc Team.
The Pickerpal Update
Patch 0.8 Highlights
[previewyoutube="TpON5ZsVbec;full"] Hey everyone, Stephen here with a progress update!
Starting from Scratch
So. We redid the entire beginning of the game...
In August, we released in Early Access. Our intention with the early access release was to put it out in "the wild" and see how people liked it.... and we felt the game needed to be changed in a major way.
Why?
We discovered some fundamental flaws with the game.... namely around the major goal of the game - to upgrade the Heartbox.
We observed that users felt like they were just mindlessly following instructions, with little understanding of what the game was really about - surviving as a very disposable android by automating everything. A big part of this was that the fuel depot required constant manually harvesting, which goes against what we were trying to do. They were also frustrated with the random deaths, and absolutely hated the random pushback spawns.
The tough decision
Starting from scratch would put us back months (6 months, as it turns out). We knew it would slow development, negatively impact the publics perception of the game, and dig into our savings. However, we felt very strongly that this was the right decision.
At the end of the day, we want the best for Atrio and its players. We took the plunge and what you're seeing today is the result of 6 months of blood, sweat and tears - a brand new beginning.
Changing the gameplay loop
I've covered this in a previous post, so I'll keep this brief. A new gameplay loop meant going back and ripping apart all of our old systems from the ground up. The issue with doing this is....
You can't release it in parts
All of the pieces need to be changed, or the whole experience wouldn't be cohesive. This forced us to put our heads down and just get it done. I admittedly should have been posting a lot more on steam (my bad!) and I am committed to doing better at posting more frequent updates.
New Fuel Depot
We refocused the gameplay loop to focus on providing the fuel depot a constant supply of fuel. The more fuel you supply, the more lightbulbs you'll be able to support. As you continue to upgrade your base, you'll unlock new fuel types. More fuel, means more light, letting you build bigger bases, and more complex factories.
A new UI
The old UI had to be scrapped entirely, as you can no longer deposit items manually. This UI focuses on showing your rolling average of fuel/min.
Fuel Types
The fuel depot only fully supports 2 types of fuel. As we progress further in development, we'll add the last two fuel types. We want to make it so that in order to acquire each of these fuel types, you need to do something completely unique, or build a new type of factory, so we ask for your patience as we build those pieces.
Dispense Chest
We observed that refilling the old fuel depot manually was very unfun on the long term. However, the players also needed a way to control how fast items went into the fuel depot, since the depot was based on an average fuel input/min.
Our solution - the dispense chest. You can control how fast or slow it dispenses, and serves for a great early game tool before you set up your pickerpals.
The PickerPal
Manually gathering plants sucks
Players got tired of gathering plants by hand really quickly, and if we were going to force them to consistently fill the fuel depot, we needed to add a way to automate it.
The pickerpal is a large, lumbering creature that automatically harvests plants and drops them back off at their stations. You can select from a variety of plants to pick from and you can even chain their stations together to save space. Once you have them set up, they'll run on their own and provide a constant supply of fuel. They're certainly not the brightest, and overcrowding is sure to cause confusion but they're hard workers and will get the job done.
Factory Redesign
We've revamped the factory, the smelter, the mini deer, and the electronics factory so players can see behind them to make them more useful.
With a 3x3 footprint, the factory is larger, but it also pulls items off the assembly line for you. This reduces complexity and makes it easier to scale up your designs.
Factory Redesign
The mini deer now shows what recipe you've selected, and we've updated his animations to.. actually have animations
Exploration Changes
Torches
We've removed the makeshift torches. Players can now research the rechargeable torch - a permanent upgrade automatically turns on when you step into the dark. If you run out of battery, running back into the light will recharge it. We didn't want players abusing exploration and instead reward them for producing lightbulbs.
Pickerpals in the wild
Until we add the battle update, pickerpals are scattered around the dark for you to find. Expect for this to change, as we intend for the player to have to go and capture creatures.
Freeplay Mode Revamped
We felt like Freeplay and Story mode were too similar. We want to incentivize players to mess around in Freeplay even after they've played the Story mode, so we've added a new biome and a new objective. Freeplay includes a new cutscene, and some hidden secrets in the dark.
The plains
We wanted to add a little more variety to our color pallet, so we added a bright yellow biome. This is our first version of the plains, and will likely continue to update it with more plants and variety as time goes on. The plains comes with two new harvestable plants - The Red shroom, the blood flower. As of right now, they are only used in a couple of recipes.... but we have big plans for them :)
The BulbMan
In Freeplay mode, your goal is to restore power to the giant BulbMan by crafting and connecting a variety of SuperBulbsfrom the fuel depot, to the BulbMan .
SuperBulbs
We've added 6 new special lightbulbs intended to power the bulb man. They require a huge number of resources to craft, and indicate progression through Freeplay mode.
We hope that Freeplay gives you a great way to experiment with all of the automation pieces while finish the main story mode.
Tilemap System
Before tackling the Freeplay mode, we stumbled across Unity's Tilemap System. The level of flexibility it provided when it comes to creating unique environments was very appealing to us and we decided to swap our environment system over. As with any feature, you typically pay the price in the beginning, and reap the rewards later in development. With this new system, creating tiles, paths, and adding new environments is quite fast, but the real benefit is when we need to go back and make tweaks to our existing environments.
In our old version, I would hand build each environment in illustrator, export or it, set up colliders, and manually add plants. With the tilemap system, we can move biomes around with little friction, as much of the process is automated. It was a fair amount of work to set up, but we anticipate that this will pay off big as we head towards 1.0. I was so excited about this, I made a vlog about it.
UI Updates
Accents
we've updated the UI to consistently use yellow accents. This makes it a lot easier to see what's highlighted, and is a first step to adding controller support.
Cancel Crafting
A highly requested feature, you can cancel items in your crafting queue. So for those of you who go a little trigger happy with crafting, we got you covered.
Quality of life changes
A better death timer
Hooo boy did we mess up with the death timer. Nearly ALL of our negative reviews on steam are related to the unavoidable battery death. We have tweaked it to be less frustrating - The first time you die is relatively the same, but all subsequent deaths have been tweaked: - Deaths happen every 30 minutes instead of every 15min. - The battery indicator above the player appears for 15 seconds instead of 1 min - Fixed a bug where the player wouldn't die when the player's battery hit 0%
A bit of a spoiler, but roughly 2 hours into the game, you unlock the ability to craft circuit juice, and you no longer involuntarily die. We have seen many playthroughs, and have set it so that the player will only die approx. 3-4 times before getting to this.
In Freeplay mode, you start with the ability to craft circuit juice, so the unavoidable death timer won't affect you.
Why keep it in? Why not just remove it?
The entire premise of the story is based around the unavoidable death timer..... which makes it awfully hard to remove. We hope that this is a good compromise.
Random pushback spawns
With our next focus being on a better battle system, we've removed the random pushbacks. In addition, our changes to the factories makes the pushbacks less important. You no longer need them in order to build a successful base.
All is not lost for the pushbacks - We are planning on reworking how the pushbacks work to make the more useful in future patches. Stay tuned.
Saves
There's no easy way to put this, so i'll just give it to you straight. With such enormous changes to both the map, and how you play the game, your old saves won't work. We've added a migration tool so you can still view your creations, but they are assuredly going to be buggy and the game won't be properly playable.
As we progress to 1.0 (and the fundamental pieces of the game start to solidify), your saves will start to carry over properly from patch to patch. We plan for it to be an incremental process (with early saves being buggy, and saves after 1.0 being carried over with no bugs), and will continue to work on it.
What's next?
Let me tell you folks, having this patch done is a huge weight off of our shoulders. Going back and changing the beginning was very daunting, but I personally find the game to be much more cohesive, and fun (we hope you agree).
Our big focus is on controller support, and experimenting with a new battle system.
Thanks for you patience and happy automating, Stephen + The Isto Inc Team.
Overhauling Atrio's UI
Hey everyone, Stephen here with a progress update! We are working hard on a new patch for you, including the new pickerpal, updated movement code for the mini deer, a new factory design, and a new mini deer captured building (amongst other smaller fixes). But I'm not here to talk about that,
I wanted to share some of our future plans for the game.
We are going to be porting to Xbox for 1.0! As it's our first time going to console, there are a lot of unknowns, so we've decided to start early.
This means for the foreseeable future, we'll be splitting our attention between content updates and xbox support. Our first major task is to add controller support.
Let's talk about Controller Support
Controller support isn't particularly sexy, it's a ton of work, and it's thankless work. But it has led us to something very sexy, and very fun to talk about. We're undergoing a HUGE update of the UI. We always knew that controller support was needed, but we're finally in a place to finalize the UI to support both controller and keyboard/mouse.
We are still at the "design" phase (i.e not implemented in game), but I wanted to share the direction that we're taking the UI!
Buckle up, we're about to deep dive into UI
1. Item Finder
I'm starting with the Item Finder because it's the one I'm most excited about. Not only did we clean up the recipe selection (menu on the left), but I gave the Item Finder a visual pass.
By adding a bigger base, there's more space to convey some much needed information (like the cardinal directions of north + south). We also can display important landmarks so players have some idea as to where to go. As this is purely concept art, we'll see how much of this makes it into the game, but I'm confident this is a step in the right direction!
2. Factory
We had an issue with getting very confused players in the late game when opening Electronics Factories, Smelters, Factories, Planters and Crafting menus. Why?
Every menu looked EXACTLY THE SAME!!!
How did we fix this? We put the item you're using at the forefront of the menu.
We needed to do a better job of establishing context in these menus. But Stephen, they JUST clicked open a factory, how could a player possibly be confused about what menu they're in? Keep in mind that when you're building an epic factory, your brain might be thinking about a million things all at once. It's our job as designers to reduce the brain load so you can focus on kicking butt and building dope stuff. Hopefully this helps.
3. Crafting Menu
This one makes me the most nervous, as it's the most behind-the-scenes work. They look pretty similar, but some fundamental changes to the navigation to support controller are bubbling underneath. You'll also notice that we've added a menu at the top. The crafting menu is going to be converted into a "tab-menu". You'll be able to cycle through different menus (not sure what they are yet), but this puts more emphasize on "tab" being your go-to menu.
I've also tried to consolidate where the eye has to look to access all of the important information. For example
I also experimented with task bar
I was hesitant to share this, as so much of this will depend on how it feels. If it feels bad to use, this design with be scrapped.... so please take this with a grain of salt. The 8 slots instead of 5 has been a highly requested feature. I take pride in including community feedback, so hopefully you guys love this change!
4. Research Menu
This was a doozy. I don't know why, but my goodness was it hard to get right. The Research menu has gone through more iterations than I care to admit (maybe 8 full iterations... sheeesh).
I attempted to simplify the background and do a better job of indicating the status of each research item. We also moved from a horizontal to a vertical design. This lets us support more classes of research items (rather than a super long singular path of research). The single path of research was kind of boring, and didn't give players the ability to choose what they wanted to focus on for research.
We're also experimenting with an idea of RP (Research Points). This is so WIP that I don't think its worth me going into detail until we confirm it meshes well in the game. What we do know is that you generate RP with Research Boosters, and RP lets you research items. More to come about research in the future.
Planter
Finally, we've added the planter. Getting fertilizer has turned out to be a massive pain in the butt, so we decided to make the fertilizer optional (I believe this was either Siede or MonkeyMan's idea in the discord. Good job team!).
We're thinking that if you add fertilizer, it either grows faster, OR it yields more plants. Again, since it's all concept art, we'll have to test it in game to see if it makes sense.
Some Crazy Ideas
Ok listen, I'm really trusting you guys when I show you these. These are so conceptual, and so untested, that we may not do any of these. Can we all agree that if none of these see the light of day, I don't get roasted online? Ok great. :)
I wanted to shed some light on the process in which we brainstorm ideas. So with that in mind, here are some crazy ideas
A minimap? It seems like a pretty useful feature to have in an automation/exploration game. But just from drawing this out, it does seem like a lot of work. I liked the idea of having a legend, and showing off your current task so when you're examining your epic factory from the sky, you are always away of what you're meant to be doing.
Some Datalogs?? I also thought that having discoverable datalogs in the world would help enrich the story! My biggest concern is the translation costs to translate a bajillion datalogs into 7 other languages is preeeeetty pricey. And to be honest, we haven't sold enough copies of Atrio to justify translating all of it. But it would be awesome to add more flavor to the world with some side stories.... so hopefully we sell enough to afford translation services!
And that's it!
I hope you enjoyed our little deep dive into the UI. Hopefully most of my proposed features eventually make it into the game, but if nothing else, we're a lot closer to a final UI than we were before. My next post will hopefully be me announcing a new content update, so stay tuned!!!
Stephen + The Isto Inc. Team
Christmas Skins are here!
Along with the redesign in our beta branch, we've added Christmas skins for a limited time only.
Come join in the festivities (and die to the dark in joyous fashion)
If you missed out latest vlog there's a lot of massive changes coming up, but will be released in a much bigger patch in the new year. These skins are just a small little thank you for everyone who has supported us!
You can read about our big upcoming changes url=https://steamcommunity.com/games/1125390/announcements/detail/3079892748614704758]it here
No new patch this month… why?
Hey everyone, Stephen here with a new progress update. We've been quiet for a while but for good reason - we completely changed the beginning.
Our gameplay loop sucked.
Well, it didn't suck, it lacked cohesion… which I guess kind of made it suck.
After releasing the game into early access, we watched a TON of playthroughs, chatted with our players, spend some time playing the game ourselves, and realized that we could do better.. This is the reason we do early access - to be able to make big changes based on your playthroughs. We also know if we didn't change it now, we wouldn't ever change it. So we decided to take a step backward, and make a better gameplay loop.
What is a gameplay loop?
"A core gameplay loop is a gameplay loop in which a highly specified set of actions undertaken by the player, most often the main actions defining the game. In Call of Duty or Battlefield, the core gameplay loop is more or less targeting enemies, shooting them, and seeking out new enemies." [Credit: Perfecting A Core Gameplay Loop]
Atrio's original gameplay loop
The original gameplay loop was as follows: 1. Get a task from the Heartbox 2. explore the dark or automate 3. to get an upgrade item 4. Upgrade the Heartbox while at the same time maintaining the fuel depot.
The two separate tasks in steps 2 & 4 made the experience very confusing for new players, and lacked a primary overarching goal for the players. Also, after watching all the playthroughs, nobody was automating fuel into the fuel depot.
We needed a single, cohesive gameplay loop that fit well with the story AND fit well with the overarching goal - to light the world (which by the way wasn't very apparent thanks to our messy gameplay loop)
Atrio's New Gameplay Loop
We hired AntiElitz, a Factorio speedrunner, for several brainstorming sessions to help explore how to make the game better. Between the two of us, we came up with a new game loop:
We've already tested it out with new players to great success, but we've broken the second half of the game. We'll need more time to re-build a cohesive experience.
So what's been done so far?
1. The fuel depot
now relies on fuel/min. The more average fuel/min, the more lightbulbs are supported
2. The Pickerpal
is a creature that automatically harvests plants on the ground and drops them onto gravpipes
3. The dispense chest
is a chest that automatically dispenses items at a set rate. You can currently choose any interval between 1/min up to 60/min. 4. All of the tutorials in story mode are different to reflect the new flow 5. A brand new training area to teach players how to use the pickerpal
What's next?
1. We will be experimenting with a new battle system! 2. Adding a new type of fuel - Shroom Fuel 3. Making our creatures less dumb. Let's be honest, they're dumb. They bump into everything, their animations slip across the ground when they walk. It's time to polish them up and get them to feel good. We have a couple of other secret items in the work, but you'll just have to wait.
This next patch will take some time, but it will be our biggest yet!
